I once wanted to show a photo to my doctor, so I copied it to a USB drive and brought it with me to an appointment. He said that the computers in the medical center don’t even have USB ports, to make sure that no malware enters their network that way.
Yeah, if your monitor is projecting text onto your face you need to turn the brightness WAY down. Also, you’ve probably just microwaved your brain.
This has long been a thing across a whole bunch of places, my accountancy firm in the uk, cannot access usb or cds, and that’s been true since 2017. Anywhere vaguely sane has had the USB ports disconnected (or more recently just connected for power, to charge things).
But lets have the bugbear which gets me. I will specifically name Die Hard 4. And use caps and bold. It is.
WHY IN HOLY FUCK DID YOU CONNECT YOUR NUCLEAR POWER STATION TO THE INTERNET???
They did that in both the last good James Bond film (Skyfall) and in the last season of Slow Horses, an otherwise intelligent spy show. It was pretty disappointing.
Superman 3
If you’re enough of a computer whiz you can hack the stock exchange, traffic lights, cashpoints, supertankers and weather satellites (which also changes the weather?) from one terminal using BASIC.
And then, despite only ever sitting for part of a programming course, since you’re a natural with computers you are now able to design a supercomputer that achieves self-awareness.
Not just BASIC, but you can write a sausage-slicing program using only PRINT statements!
I know I’ve seen some movie where the text was projected onto someone’s face and you could read it instead of it being in reverse. Unless that’s some computer reversal text function dealie I’m unaware of.
Regarding hacking a computer via a thumb drive, I saw a YouTube video a few months ago that it’s possible to embed malicious hardware in a USB charging cable, so you could capture passwords and other data from someone who uses it to charge their smartphone.
I haven’t seen the Bond yet, but yeah: Slow Horses is one of the examples! I also saw it last season on an episode of High Potential (which I like).
So the moral of this story is “don’t stick random things into your devices, kids.” 
(yeah, yeah: there’s a sex joke in there, which I almost made but then didn’t…knock yourselves out 
)
There have been people in the street by our office handing out free charging cables and our IT department have made it EXTREMELY clear that we should not under any circumstances use these cables in the office or with any office-related equipment, for this very reason. And, ideally, not use them at all for anything.
I haven’t seen them so I can’t opine on who they might be. But apparently it’s a real concern.
No, you’re just trying to make sense of some cinematic nonsense. It’s not a thing that happens but it looks cooler than just a person sitting at a desk typing.
Oh and one more “day saved by just shooting the computer” example: Under Siege 2: The One With The Train. That’s technically a spoiler but honestly, if I’ve just saved you from watching this film – you’re welcome.
Wow. That’s not at all suspicious, especially if you work someplace like a bank or government agency. Did they have Russian accents?
Financial sector. As I said, I didn’t encounter them personally but I’d be more likely to suspect China tbh.
From what I understand, they put a a bunch of infected drives in what looked like their original packaging, and scattered them around the facility’s parking lot. At least one programmer saw one on the ground, thought “Cool, free thumb drive!”, used it on his computer, and the rest is history.
Of course, one reason Stuxnet worked is that it didn’t launch a huge flashing-lights invasion of its target computer the moment it was plugged in, like in the movies, but instead burrowed inside quietly and its work over the course of several months, if not years.
I can’t really think of any other reasons to be handing out free charging cables on a streetcorner.
Let’s be generous and say he unplugged the PC, not the monitor. Was that PC being hacked, or the sever it was using?
When I worked for the NHS in the 1990s, they came round and physically disabled all external drives on all the computers. It’s too tempting to plug that free game on a thumb drive that also installs a virus or whatever.
The short man had a Russian accent, as well as his female companion who muttered something about “big trouble for moose and squirrel.”
Like any successful virus (and why fast acting zombie viruses shouldn’t cross the atlantic/pacific), it gets much further with a period of hibernation being passive with no symptoms.
But the iranians were asking for it, air gapped computers, sure, but with the usb ports connected? That’s like a child-like failure in security, and IT people should have been… No wait, they probably were.
I could see that management overrode the recommendations of IT. And to be fair, they do need a way to move files from one computer to another.